Tuesday, December 20, 2011

ETERNAL RETURN

It took me almost
the whole of December to make this very short video and
what I've learned is that I want to go back to painting.

I started with
a desire to express feelings of nostalgia,
sadness and mystery about my
Russian ancestry, my father and his relatives,
known and unknown, and bewilderment
about the impermanence of life and the tenacity
of personality, of family resemblance, of faces fusing
into other faces.

I wanted to make a video
that would be like a painting but with gentle movement
taking place at various distances from the spectator.
I built a kind of mini stage-set out of three
cardboard boxes, one inside the other, with windows cut
out of the back, roof and sides. I painted the inside
of the boxes so that when lights were placed between
them, you could see the colours of rooms behind rooms.
On sheets of acetate I printed (digitally, through
ink-jet printer) small photos of my Russian relatives,
cut them out, then hung them on gold threads from wooden
bars and from the ceilings of two front boxes. What I didn't take into consideration
was that the camera and the naked eye are two altogether
different species. The depth that my
naked eye perceived was completely lost when the camcorder
was pointed in the same direction.

Here is the final version, after discarding about
seven others. It's a compromise but I don't dislike
it. I borrowed one of Alexander
Vertinsky's songs for the soundtrack because
he fits the mood so well and because my father liked
him so much. I couldn't find a clip of his particular
favourite, which started with (pardon my phonetics
- I don't speak Russian but understand
a few words): Ti
sidish adinoke....(You sit alone, staring
at the flames....) There are lots of Vertinsky songs
on YouTube and if you like the nostalgic chansonnier style, look him up.

Here's the permalink from
VIMEO (it's a bigger screen over there) if you can't see it below.